Stan Brakhage and the Méliès Way
March 2008
This essay marks out a polarity between Lumière cinema and Méliès cinema, one observational, the other manipulative, and argues that the greatest exponent of the Méliès aesthetic in the last hundred years has been the American filmmaker, Stan Brakhage. Brakhage’s work is counterpointed with that of Andy Warhol, who reinvented pure observational cinema, with Michael Snow’s Wavelength, and in particular with the work of Hollis Frampton, who was pulled both towards photography/ observation, and towards the rapid sequencing of images/ manipulation. What in particular unified Brakhage and Frampton was the awareness that the discovery of the lens during the Renaissance has conditioned the way we see the world so that ordered, perspectival observation rules.
Brakhage’s films strive continually to work on the spectator’s consciousness, to “come on to the nervous system”, something he came to early in a long and prolific career as a film-maker, and which is exemplified perhaps most clearly in the dense abstraction of his hand-painted films of the 1980s and 1990s, although his milestone film came in 1963 in the form of Mothlight. The gestural techniques shown in his films not only link him to the Abstract Expressionism of a painter like Jackson Pollock, whom he encountered in his formative years, but make particularly significant the difficulty he had as a child with glasses and the liberation he experienced when, in throwing them away, he turned the ‘limitations’ of his vision into a new way of seeing the world, one whose origin he traced back enthusiastically to Georges Méliès.
For the full essay, click here [pdf, 14 pages].
The Criterion DVD of selected Brakhage films is now an essential introduction